The Dark Forest was created for Forest of Imagination at the National Trust Assembly Rooms.

The installation brought together a series of dead box trees—stripped bare by the invasive box tree caterpillar and gathered into a dark, hexagonal chamber. Lit with an otherworldly purple glow, the space felt part shrine, part trap: a place reminiscent of a moth or fly trap, suspended between attraction and danger. Positioned as a threshold between rooms, The Dark Forest became a portal—an in-between space that visitors passed through, rather than simply observed.

The work was accompanied by an immersive soundscape. A fragment of Franz Liszt’s Preaching to the Birds was interwoven with field recordings: caterpillars chewing leaves, moths beating their wings, the faint squeaks of larvae, and the calls of jackdaws. Together, these sounds blurred the line between music and ecology, beauty and unease.

The inclusion of jackdaws referenced a quiet discovery at another National Trust property, where careful observation revealed that the birds had begun feeding on the caterpillars. Once the box trees were partially eaten, small access points allowed the jackdaws in despite the caterpillars’ toxic defences, previously assumed to deter all predators. Rather than panic or eradication, the solution emerged through watching, listening, and allowing relationships to reveal themselves.

The Dark Forest reflects on this idea: that answers are often already present if we slow down enough to notice them. It is a meditation on attention over intervention, patience over panic, and the possibility of learning from what the landscape is quietly telling us, before we find ourselves trapped by our own urgency.